The Man who Lived, and Left
by ManMadeofLasers
Summary: After the death of Voldemort and everything he suffered to get there, Harry finds what he actually wants to do with his life. One-shot.


(A/N): Hey all, I came up with this basic idea a while back, and it just made me laugh. This is just going to be a small one-shot, I hope it entertains you as much as it did me.

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It was a quiet day, but with good reason. The Australian sun beat down relentlessly on the land, and with all of the rain from the past week it was muggier than any English summer could hope to be. It was the kind of day that drove people inside, and convinced them to stay there.

A pair of kilometers outside the Moggill State forest and the Anstead Bushland, perhaps a dozen or so from Brisbane, sat a cozy diner. The diner looked like one of the classics you might find anywhere in middle-America, making it something of an oddity in Oz.

The diner sat alone on its property, one that extended for nearly a kilometer in either direction and easily two heading back. It saw a lot of business usually, being at the tail end of the D'Aguilar range, which saw considerable muggle and magical traffic (Kangaroos being of considerable interest to both parties).

The diner was known for a few things. First and foremost: its food. The food at it was considered something of a local secret. It was something that they guarded jealously, as no one wanted their favorite hangout and family dinner place crowded with more than one of two lucky tourists.

People swore on their lives that it had the best food and the best cook any of them had ever heard of. Tourists lucky enough to have found it raved about it being better than meals at triple the price they had in some of the finest restaurants in places like New York, Paris, and across Italy.

This First feature was closely related to the second thing that made the diner unique. The kitchen and the chef. The kitchen was something of a miracle of modern muggle and magical technology. It held top of the range grills, the finest knives hand made by specialists from Japan, refrigerators lined with runes to keep things fresh and cool. Most unusually, the entire kitchen area was runed from hell to breakfast in such a way that the inside functioned much like a time turner. A few flicks of a switch, and the chef had hours to hand make each hamburger, to grill every steak, and to sauté the living daylights out of whatever was required.

This isn't to imply that the chef was some kind of slouch that needed hours to do so. No, dear reader, the chef in question was thirty-three years old, and despite his age had spent nearly four decades subjective time studying his art. His skill reaching far enough to truly squeeze his kitchen for everything it was worth.

Yes, Harry Potter had truly come into his own.

The defeat of Voldemort at the age of seventeen had left the boy adrift in the world. And after a year of avoiding the ministry's attempts to award him medals, imprison him as the next dark lord, and force him into attending the school he had spent so much time and nearly died so many times in, he was struck with inspiration.

Harry sat in a booth at a hole-in-the wall fish and chips joint in one of the seedier parts of down town London. Next to him sat his girlfriend, Ginny, and his two best friends (now dating) Hermione and Ron.

The three with him carried on a conversation of their own, Harry didn't pay attention, and as they spoke he stared into his chips and wondered for the thousandth time what he actually wanted to do with his life.

Rom and Hermione seemed to be arguing again, Ginny was taking her brother's side, and Harry picked up a single chip and looked at it. Hogwarts and the staff wanted him. The ministry wanted him. Mrs. Weasley wanted him. The public wanted him. Ginny wanted him.

What did he want?

As the argument of the couple and his lady friend to his side reached a climax, scaring a few of the other patrons in the place, he realized in an instant what he actually wanted.

Harry Potter wanted to be left alone. He wanted to live alone unmolested by anyone trying to use him, and honestly, he wanted to be a cook. It was the only positive thing he had gotten from his childhood. Harry Potter, boy who lived, man who won, really only considered his finest personal achievement to be the construction of a damn fine burger. It had been the only bright spot of his and his friend's journey around England. Cooking for them, and then later only Hermione, when they were off running for their lives and hiding.

So, he resolved, I'm gonna go do that.

Thirteen years later, he had gone off with his god-son and done just that. Using a time turner bought from one of the more interesting market stalls along Knockturn alley, Harry went and passed through Le Cordon Bleu in a few months. When he got bored with that and Little Teddy had mastered French, he headed to Japan, having acquired a passing interest in sushi (Teddy having acquired a more than passing interest in anime). Following Japan, he found himself in Turkey, and after that came Chile, Colombia, the Colonies, and a delightful bar he spent two full objective years tending outside a coal miner's town in the Canadian Rockies.

Along the way, he lost track with Britain and everyone there. He had his god-son and his work to keep him busy. Sometime following Japan Ginny left him, bored with the life he wanted to live. In turkey he met a delightful witch named Antheia who taught him a lot about the world. She left him there, and he traveled on the whim of himself and Teddy until his second year in the Rockies, when he got a letter from Hermione down in Oz.

She had found her parents, she had dumped Ron, and she wanted to know what he was doing with his life.

With a supreme lack of other things to do, Teddy having exhausted his interest in survival training, and the waitress that entertained Harry so having moved to British Columbia to study medicine after a mysterious scholarship paid her way, the pair packed their bags again and left for Australia.

Harry met his old friend, someone he hadn't seen in nearly twenty years inside his own timeline. Harry and Teddy met her parents. Using some of the things they learned while they had been globe-trotting and studying cooking, Harry and his god-son managed what nearly a hundred thousand galleons and an even score of mind-healers hadn't. They fully restored their memory from the poorly executed memory charm Hermione had done more than a decade before.

After hanging out with the best friend he had ever had in his youth, and formally meeting her parents for the first real time, Harry and Teddy decided to give Oz a go, and bought a chunk of land outside Brisbane and made themselves a diner.

Hermione, upon learning that Harry knew fuck-all about running a business, and Teddy just wanted to learn from the aboriginals, took over the books for him and unceremoniously moved into the apartment adjacent to his that he had built on the property behind the diner.

Two years later they married and formally adopted Teddy as their own.

Bringing us all up to the present.

It was deliriously hot out, and Hermione sat in front of the order window talking to her husband as he puttered about in the kitchen. Business had been low recently, a function of the weather, but truth be told the job just occupied the couple's time. From the full Potter and Black fortunes Harry had more than enough to fund them for another full century, including his wife's expensive taste in techno-magical research done in their 'shed'. A shed which was actually a multi-million galleon research complex carved out of the ground outside their place.

Teddy sat beside his mum, paging through a self-updating Daily Prophet.

"Oh Bugger."

A brief smack to his side and exclaimed "Theodore!" later, he continued, "Seems someone finally broke ole' Grindlewald's body out of Nuremgard. Looks like they animated it, and are reviving the Knights of Walpurgis."

Harry sighed from his place in the kitchen, and began dusting the flour off his hands.

"You know what that means, Hun."

Hermione rolled her eyes, "Of course I do."

Harry briefly washed his hands, before doffing his apron and leaving the kitchen. As he opened the door to the restaurant proper, the runes circling the door seemed to freeze in place, and gave a small hiss.

Briefly, the man cracked his neck, and stretched his arms out over his head. Hermione stood and crossed the small space to her husband, lovingly rubbing some of the tension from his shoulder for a moment before circling him with her arms.

"You know what I'm going to say now, don't you?"

Harry grinned and broke the circle of his beloved wife's arms, "Of course I do, love. And you know what I'm going to say too."

Teddy rolled his eyes behind them.

Giving his wife a kiss, Harry broke from her and moved to the register. Reaching a single arm above it he plucked a massive broadsword from the wall. It shimmered in the light, projecting a rainbow onto the wall. He hefted it a bit in his hand before conjuring a sheath for it and placing it on his back.

As it passed into the conjured leather sheath, Hermione spied the words that had made her laugh three years ago, and still brought a glint to her eye today. Engraved into the blade was the phrase 'We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone'.

Now wait a minute, you might be saying, why does Harry give a shit about someone reanimating some old dark lord corpse and using it to terrorize Europe? Harry left!

That's true! Thanks for noticing that, good question by the way. I, ManMadeOfLasers, may have left a bit out of the story. Let me go back a moment and check...

Ah! Yes, there it is. I dropped a bit out.

Harry left the British shores for the Cordon Bleu cooking school. He wanted to find himself some formal instruction in the art he chose as his formal profession. While he was there he may have fought and destroyed the Malfoi family, who had infiltrated and usurped the duly recognized French magical government. In between time turned lessons, he broke the family, dueling their head and using the family's magic to bind the rest of their lineage into undying formal service to the French muggle government, specifically their environmental services and sewage treatment divisions.

In Japan Harry apprenticed himself to Jiro Ono, sushi master, and through several years of time turned lessons and running the day to day operations of the man's shop became a master of the craft. In his off time, he may or may not have done battle with a magical faction of the Sumiyoshi-kai, Japan's second largest 'Yakuza' gang, who were intent on bringing to life the long dead spirit of the _Kamikaze_ storms that broke the Mongol invasions of Kublai Kahn.

Turkey taught Harry a lot about traditional Turkish and Arab cooking, along with martial combat, as he put down a pair of twins who were attempting to gain followers and rise as dark lords in their own right. With a Greek-born woman named Antheia assigned to the same case by the ICW, he brought them down and killed many of their more violent followers.

Chile saw Harry, with his god-son's assistance; stop the summoning of an elder god from the outer darkness. Columbia saw the pair eradicate the last of the mad priests intent on the same. Both taught Harry more than anyone had any right to know about the madness at the edges of reality, as well as a lot about traditional South American cooking.

In America Harry refined the ancient and holy art of grilling a hamburger. It was the crown jewel of his trip across the globe so far. From one of the truest American wizards he could find, Ted Nugent, Harry learned about hunting and killing your own meat for the burger, how that could make it even better. Along with that knowledge he and Teddy learned more than their fair share about magically enhanced fire-arms.

When the mad wizard Nugent wasn't teaching them, Harry brought Teddy to the magical wing of MIT in Boston, where the pair worked alongside the magical division of the FBI to stop one of the students from combining the properties of basilisk and manticore venom with a mundane disease known as Ebola.

The Rockies had been a normal vacation for the pair (who wore out their welcome with Master Nugent by being caught drinking tea one morning); they were directed by the royal Canadian Mounties (actually already a magical organization) to a small coal mining town where a company was on the edge of breaking into a goblin city.

At the direction of the Canadian goblin horde, Harry and his god-son posed as miners, and transfigured vast swathes of the Canadian Rockies into ore-bearing rock, effectively re-directing the company away from a breach of the international statute of secrecy.

A few years after all of this, back in Australia, Harry walked to the front door of the diner and with a jaunty salute went out to the ward line of the restaurant at the edge of the parking lot. With a short pop he was away.


End file.
